Facebook has a 'black people problem,' says former senior staffer hired to focus on 'underrepresented voices'

“Facebook has a black people problem,” according to Mark Luckie, former Facebook strategic partner manager for global influencers focused on underrepresented voices. (Joerg Koch / AP)

A former senior staffer at Facebook charges the social media platform “has a black people problem.”

Mark Luckie — who’s black and held the role of strategic partner manager for global influencers focused on underrepresented voices — detailed a number of issues he sees with the site in a memo posted Tuesday on Facebook.

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The memo was originally sent to “all of Facebook’s employees around the world” Nov. 8, “shortly before my final day at the company,” Luckie writes.

“Facebook has a black people problem,” Luckie began the memo. “One of the platform’s most engaged demographics and an unmatched cultural trendsetter is having their community divided by the actions and inaction of the company. This loss is a direct reflection of the staffing and treatment of many of its black employees.”

Luckie points out that through his job function at the company, he’s been “uniquely exposed to the issues surrounding the internal and external representation of black people here.”

Among the problems that plague Facebook, Luckie says, is that the number of employees there don’t reflect its most engaged group of users.

“There is often more diversity in Keynote presentations than the teams who present them,” the former staffer states. “In some buildings, there are more ‘Black Lives Matter’ posters than there are actual black people. Facebook can’t claim that it is connecting communities if those communities aren’t represented proportionately in its staffing.”

A Facebook rep told the Daily News that the company has been working diligently over the past few years to increase the range of perspectives among employees.

“The growth in representation of people from more diverse groups, working in many different functions across the company, is a key driver of our ability to succeed,” Facebook spokesman Anthony Harrison said in a statement.

Luckie also claims there’s racial discrimination at Facebook.

“I’ve heard far too many stories from black employees of a colleague or manager calling them ‘hostile’ or ‘aggressive’ for simply sharing their thoughts in a manner not dissimilar from their nonblack team members,” Luckie states. “A few black employees have reported being specifically dissuaded by their managers from becoming active in the [internal] Black@ group or doing ‘Black stuff,’ even if it happens outside of work hours. Too many black employees can recount stories of being aggressively accosted by campus security beyond what was necessary.”

The former Facebook manager wrote that at least two or three times each day, one of his colleagues at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters looked at him and held more tightly to their wallet until he passed.

“We want to fully support all employees when there are issues reported and when there may be microbehaviors that add up,” Harrison said. “We are going to keep doing all we can to be a truly inclusive company.”

In a Tuesday tweet responding to Facebook’s statement, Luckie called its tone “noticeably different from the only response I received from senior leadership after sharing the post internally.”

He then shared screenshots of an unidentified employee writing to him, “The post landed on me as pretty self-serving and disingenuous. To claim that you’re doing it for the community, and then do it in that fashion — it loses all sincerity in my eyes.”

The charges against Facebook are particularly alarming, the memo states, since black people are among the most engaged demographics on Facebook.

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“Black people are far outpacing other groups on the platform in a slew of engagement metrics,” Luckie writes. “African-Americans are more likely to use Facebook to communicate with family and friends daily, according to research commissioned by Facebook.”

He shares that 63% of African-Americans use Facebook to communicate with family, and 60% use the platform to engage with friends at least once a day, compared with 53% and 54%, respectively, of the total population.

The memo’s public release Tuesday came as a slew of other scandals rocked Facebook.

A Canadian representative at a U.K. hearing Tuesday got into a heated exchange with Facebook's vice president of policy solutions, Richard Allan. Charlie Angus, vice chairman of Canada’s House of Commons' Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, suggested anti-trust regulation and breaking up the company due to lack of competition thanks to Facebook also owning Instagram and other social media apps.